Tarkovsky’s ‘Stalker’
There is a moment in the film Stalker when the Writer, after a terrifying journey down a long tunnel known as The Meat Grinder, discovers a round metallic cylinder or container, a little over a metre in diameter, into which he peers, picks up a rock, and lets it fall. According to Zona, Geoff Dyer’s brilliant study of the film (and much more besides), ‘the stone . . . makes no sound when it lands, because there is no splash or clang at all, and then, after ten or twelve seconds, there is an echoey, clanging splash suggesting that the drop is about the height of the Empire State Building at least . . . Given the depth, it’s quite ballsy of Writer to perch on the rim of this drum – a drum that is in fact a mile-deep shaft – as if on the edge of a paddling pool made from Meccano.’
And here’s the thing: I was thinking about the film today just before I had a meeting with a visual artist, who in the course of our conversation – she was talking about Gilles Deleuze, actually – said that what Deleuze didn’t understand, what he couldn’t grasp, was that for the artist the abyss is vital, and the entire life project of the artist might be to perch on the precipice, on the rim above the abyss – I can’t remember precisely what she said, but it was something like that – and this image of the Writer flashed past me, perched as though oblivious (the adjective is apt) on the edge of that cylindrical precipice, that terrifyingly deep pit or abyss. And I was so grateful for that insight, and because that sequence in the film has stuck with me, I knew exactly how to visualise it. It was one of those synchronicities that imbue the passing of the days with what I like to think of as a form of Sympathetic Magic.
And then, shortly after, is the moment in the film when the eponymous Stalker, Writer and Professor have just abandoned their quest, the room in which they were to accomplish the fulfilment of their innermost wishes left unvisited, nothing achieved, no one satisfied or appeased, just life or what remains of it continuing as before, but the participants more exhausted, more shattered, shredded by an inexorable sense of finality – in spite of everything having been said, and nothing said, and none of it mattering – this is the moment when the rain comes down, and with it, if this is possible, descends both a consummate despair and a terrible cleansing, as though the almost unbearable build up of tension (some might say the unbearable nature of the whole cinematic experience) is washed away in the downpour, the rain that falls and falls without mercy or relief on the souls of the living, and what has been left behind , and what is to come, and which holds only that tiny flicker of hope carried by a child, nothing more . . .
And this is the scene in the bar, afterwards. The dark colours could be out of Rembrandt. Thank God for the dog, just visible to the left of the screen. How strange that the presence of an animal is the element that most imbues the scene with humanity.
‘The opposite of love’ and the abuse of power: with Gérard Depardieu and John Berger
Depardieu sticks out his tongue as his stomach takes centre stage
I missed the film Welcome to New York, a thinly disguised account of the Dominique Strauss-Kahn scandal, when it was released a couple of years back, but watched it last night with Mrs Blanco. The film stars Gérard Depardieu as ‘Georges Deveraux’ and the first twenty minutes of the film are pretty ghastly, with a lot of fumbling and groping, forced laughter, ice-cream smearing and buttock-slapping, climaxing in a display of loud, ursine grunting from the gross and panting Depardieu, who hasn’t even bothered to take off his raincoat. Later, we are treated to the formidable sight of the actor stripping in a police cell, his stomach unfurling from his pants like a mudslide, under the bewildered gaze of a police guard, who, as Depardieu struggles to pull on his socks, is heard to mutter ‘quite a workout’. But the later scenes between Depardieu and his wife Sophie (played by an exasperated Jacqueline Bisset) are fraught with a compelling and awful tension. In one their arguments, the Bisset character tells Depardieu that ‘the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference’.
But I have begun with a digression, since the comment that the Bisset character makes to her chronically sex-obsessed husband reminded me of something John Berger wrote, in an entirely different context:
The opposite of to love is not to hate but to separate. If love and hate have something in common it is because, in both cases, their energy is that of bringing and holding together – the lover with the loved, the one who hates with the hated. Both passions are tested by separation.
And, of course, separation can lead to indifference, or else arise from it. Indifference to the object of one’s emotions, whether originating in love or hate, leads to, or is born of, separation.
In and our faces, my heart, brief as photos, Berger wrote of his stay in Livorno during the late 1940s. The city was war-scarred and poor, and Berger learned, he says, for the first time, ‘the ingenuity of the dispossessed.’ And he writes:
It was there too I discovered that I wanted as little as possible to do in this world with those who wield power. This has turned out to be a lifelong aversion.
Which brings us back to Depardieu, in his role as a fictionalised Strauss-Kahn. In a peculiar little intro to the film, the actor tells reporters he was moved to take the part because he doesn’t trust politicians and ‘hated’ the person he was playing in the film. Now, I don’t entirely trust this contrived little vignette, but concur fully with Berger’s aversion. I have an instinctive distrust of anyone who wants to exercise power, whether in politics, local government, or institutions such as ‘The University’. Welcome to New York is about the gross misuse of power (Do you know who I am? Deveraux asks the terrified hotel cleaner before sexually assaulting her). The arrogance of that question! It speaks of the assumption of power allowing ugly minds to prosper in the exercise of self-aggrandisement. But it is a question that every tin Hitler wants to ask, across the spectrum, and which might better be re-phrased: Do you know who I think I am?
Of Dogs and Death
Dogs (such as this one, in the Museum of Anthropology, Mexico City) guided their people to the next world in Aztec culture.
I wrote once before about Juan Rulfo and his novel Pedro Paramo, which has unparalleled status in Mexican literature and was a major influence on the young Gabriel García Márquez on his arrival in Mexico City in 1961.
I recently spent an evening reading Juan Rulfo’s short stories El llano en llama (translated into English both as The Plain in Flames and The Burning Plain). The stories were written in the long wake of the Mexican revolution, which coincided with Rulfo’s own childhood in an orphanage in Jalisco where, he said later, he often saw corpses hanging from posts, and that he spent all his time reading, “because you couldn’t go out for fear of getting shot.” These stories lead the reader into a space of silence and mystery, where reality breaks down and we enter a world that might be the antechamber to the afterlife, if the afterlife you have in mind is bleak, featureless, devoid of anything that could pass as life at all. But there are ghosts, at least.
The rhythms of Rulfo’s prose remind me of what Octavio Paz wrote about his archetypal Mexican: “his language is full of reticences, of metaphors and allusions, of unfinished phrases, while his silence is full of tints, folds, thunderheads, sudden rainbows, indecipherable threats . . .” There are threats aplenty, but they are unformed, vaguely defined and usually at some distance from the place of narration – yet always getting closer. Events take place in a half-light, as characters stumble towards yet another failure, or else death.
In the first story in Rulfo’s collection, ‘They have given us land’, a group of four landless men trudge across an arid plain. They have been promised land by some government official, but the ground beneath them is dry, stony, utterly unsuitable for planting anything that might grow. There had been more than twenty in their group, and they had horses and rifles, but now there are only four, and they have nothing, apart from a hen, which one of them keeps hidden inside his coat. “After walking for so many hours without coming across even the shadow of a tree, even the seed of a tree, nor the root of anything, we heard the barking of dogs.”
In another story ‘Don’t you hear the dogs barking’, a man carries his adult son on his back to try and find a doctor in the town of Tonaya. The younger man is wounded. It is night-time and the old man cannot see where he is going. As the pair draw near to the town we learn through the father’s faltering monologue that his son is a thief and a murderer, and he is only carrying him out of respect for the boy’s dead mother.
In these two stories, the barking of dogs indicates the existence, if not of hope precisely, then of some form of life, of human dwellings at the very least. But perhaps that is a false reading. In Mesoamerican cultures dogs were considered to have the powers to guide the dead to a new life after death, which explains why dogs have frequently been found buried with people in pre-Columbian sites.
And of course, at the end of Malcolm Lowry’s masterpiece, Under the Volcano, a dead dog is thrown down the ravine after the dead body of the unfortunate consul.
To come full circle, I discovered today that Rulfo had a bit-part in a Spanish film based on a short story by Gabriel García Márquez. The film is called En este pueblo no hay ladrones (In this town there are no thieves), and is exceptional in that the cast is made up of notable writers, visual artists and film directors, including Luis Buñuel (clearly relishing his performance as the town priest), Leonora Carrington, Arturo Ripstein, Alfonso Arao, Abel Quezada, and Gabriel García Márquez himself.
Juan Rulfo (left) and Abel Quezada having a beer, in a scene from ‘En este pueblo no hay ladrones’ based on a short story by Gabriel García Márquez.
The Accidental Tourist
So I’m crossing a bridge, to get from A to B, and suddenly I’m on a film set. No, let’s correct that: I’m on a rolling series of film sets. This is what happens on a brisk stroll around central Paris. First, a polka through the old Jewish quarter, Le Marais, then across the river via the Pont des Arts (Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain, The Bourne Identity) as shown here in my artfully contrived photo, where lovers place padlocks, cadenas d’amour, in order to imprison the object of their desire for perpetuity. Then to lunch at Le Polidor, made famous by Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris.
I am pleased to report that our waitress lived up to my wildest expectations, embodying the French talent for what foreigners erroneously believe to be rudeness (a kind of exaggerated politeness, dressed with venom) which is actually something quite different: it is, as I discovered – and it took me years to work this out – a direct challenge to the interlocutor. It says: how are going to take this? Lying down like un wimp, or joining in with a bit of callous and vituperative banter of your own? If you opt for the latter, you cannot lose. If you succumb to the former – the classic anglo-american mistake – you inevitably feel maltreated and offended. So join in, dammit! Throw back a few witty and sophisticated remarks of your own, not forgetting to smile charmingly as you do so. It cannot fail.
Later in the afternoon, after strolling past the houses once occupied by Joyce (a British writer of Irish Origin?) and Hemingway (but also, and perhaps more significantly, Pound) what could be merrier than a crêpe, in a crêperie which my Argentinian companion, Jorge, assures me is the only place in Paris that serves dulce de leche – which I must admit I find hard to believe – in Rue Mouffetard.
Also recognizable from Amélie in Rue Mouffetard is the seafood stall at the bottom of that street, which nagged at my memory from I knew not where, but now I do.
It’s quite possible that a short walk around the fifth arrondissement satisfies the needs of all five senses more rapidly than anywhere else on earth. But who knows, perhaps I’m just biased.
I set out on a journey
Imagine my surprise (horror/fascination/wonder) on receiving a photo on my iphone a couple of months ago, displaying the shoulder of a regular at The Promised Land (a charming fellow and good acquaintance: I do not know him well enough to claim him as a friend) who had had tattooed upon himself a short poem of mine, in its entirety. The poem is called ‘Restless Geography’, and, in case it is difficult to make out the words in the picture, it goes like this:
I set out on a journey, but the geography would not
stay still, and I ended up somewhere I hadn’t intended
going.
I wanted to use this as the title of a collection of prose poems, but the publishers said it was too long, and I would have to cut it down, which I didn’t want to do. So we called the book Sad Giraffe Café instead.
The night before last, the house having being borrowed by daughters, who were entertaining friends, I put down the book of poems I was reading, and Mrs Blanco and I set off under Scary Bridge, and across the road into the Vue cinema and fitness complex. The long haul up the escalators presented a panorama of the huge gym on the first floor. The place was almost empty, just a few Wednesday night loners pumping iron and a solitary immobile cyclist. All three of them were young men. There was something tragic in this display of righteous pumping and pedalling in the perennial pursuit for a well-toned physique and bulging biceps under the blinding glare of strip-lighting. All I could see, as we glided past them on our upward journey, was a dreadful torpor. All I could see – as Beckett might have said, actually did say – was ashes. This set the tone for the rest of the evening. The chatty girl in the empty ticket hall (a dozen cinemas, no visible customers) told us we were the only people to have bought tickets for Seven Psychopaths, the new film by Martin McDonagh, and starring Colin Farrell, Woody Harrelson, Sam Rockwell, Christopher Walken and Tom Waits (pictured, here, in an empty cinema).
So Mrs Blanco and I chose our seats, two thirds of the way back, next to the aisle, and had the place to ourselves. This is a strange sensation. A private viewing in a full-size cinema. The seats are very comfortable at Vue, and there is plenty of space, but even so it is a luxury to lounge in abandoned fashion, and lounge we did. It is a pleasure to be able to loudly curse the fools who populate the ads and the trailers, as practically every film that Hollywood chucks at places like the Vue franchise are complete tripe. Trivial meaningless drivel circling around a half dozen well-worn and clichéd themes, all of them dire and depressing.
But the empty cinema inspires melancholy, rather than depression. The film is entertaining, even if it adheres to many of the post-modern meta-fictional tropes made fashionable by Tarantino. Nevertheless it made me laugh like a loon, which is never a bad thing. Laughed myself almost into a stupor at various points in the movie, in fact.
We came home around midnight, and the party was breaking up. The young were setting off for Clwb Ifor Bach or some other Cardiff nightspot.
Earlier in the evening, when I had been reading through the Selected Poems of Roger Garfitt, two short lines from his poem ‘The Journey’ had stood out:
I had to go on
without me
And I realised these lines evoked the precise emotion that had (paradoxically) accompanied me earlier that evening, as I passed the young men pumping iron in the empty gym, on our way up the escalator to the empty cinema. I realised also that if I had not been accompanied by Mrs Blanco, my evening would have been unutterably desolate and solitary (in a bad way). Company helps divert us, temporarily, from our essential and terrifying aloneness, allows us to go on, even if ‘without oneself’, who is unaccountably absent, then at least sharing the emptiness with a warm and sentient human partner.
Afterwards, I lay awake, and the words of Garfitt’s poem stayed with me long into the night.
Blistering Blue Barnacles!
Buckwheat pancakes with maple syrup and bacon (the latter a rare commodity in the Blanco kitchen these days) all washed down with lashings of coffee made with real beans: what a way to start a Sunday. Not only that, but today’s is the ONE HUNDREDTH (100th) POST SINCE BLANCO BEGAN BLOGGING ON SUNDAY 10TH JULY THIS YEAR. HUZZAH!
Last night we went to see the Spielberg/Jackson production of Tintin (The Adventures of). Mrs Blanco and I were agreed that Captain Haddock (played by Andy Serkis with a magnificent quasi-Scots drawl) and Snowy (aka Milou) the dog stole the show. Tintin is always so damned earnest, but more alarmingly for me, bore an uncanny resemblance to a young Welsh novelist of my acquaintance, and he returned in a more complex hybrid form later, to haunt my dreams, a sort of Tintinesque literary prodigy ploughing the astral plains in search of Ultimate Literary Truth. God help us.
The Tintin stories, for all their being imperialist and racist (charges which no one in their right minds would dispute) created in young readers of my generation – long before the advent of gap years hanging loose on Thai beaches or trekking in the Andes – an ambition to see the world, to become an explorer of worlds. And this is what excited me from an early age. A Dutch student of mine once told me that her grandmother said that children who love the Tintin books will become travellers as adults, and those that don’t won’t. I have a suspicion that something of the kind might be true.
In the meantime I must refrain from embarrassing myself and my dear ones by coming out with exclamations like ‘Great Snakes!’ or ‘Blistering Blue Barnacles!’.
On a quite unrelated theme, I see the film of Owen Sheers’ novel Resistance will be out shortly, with an introductory talk by the author/scriptwriter at Chapter Arts Centre in Cardiff on Saturday 26th November, which I will miss as I am off to Mexico that weekend. In fact I was invited to Mexico along with the same Mr Sheers, who is clearly otherwise engaged – but I share with Owen a childhood fantasy – we grew up a few miles (but two decades) away from each other in the Black Mountains – both playing games that involved charging around in the bracken and ferns evading Nazis, something which I discovered quite by accident while chatting to Owen when we were doing a series of readings together in New York (and where Resistance – the novel – was getting its U.S. launch). What a perennial occupation this Nazi obsession must have been for boys growing up in the decades following World War 2: is it still? I have no idea. But how profoundly the mythology of Nazism has infiltrated our psychological as well as our historical agenda.
And this leads me to the third topic of the day, or the fourth if we include breakfast: the front cover of the Vintage paperback edition of The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell.
The picture shows a solitary German soldier walking down a country road in what I imagine is some part of the Soviet Union. If, as the acknowledgement claims, the photo was taken in 1943, the soldier is probably in retreat. In the background and to his side, across a field, are other soldiers, themselves walking alone. There is snow on the ground, and it is either still snowing or else there is a mist. The soldier is walking purposefully, and carrying a rifle over his soldier, so is not in a state of combat. I am fascinated by the photograph, and am trying to work out why. Is it to do with the solitary status of the soldier, knowing as we do the vast numbers of troops involved in the invasion of Russia and in its defence, the huge tallies of the dead that Littell’s protagonist Dr Max Aue recites ad absurdum in the introduction to his story? From what source does the poignancy of this image derive, and why does it affect me so?
I think the focus on the individual soldier is meant to reinforce Max Aue’s refrain that yes, he is responsible, he did the things which he recites, but that he was an individual in a chain of command, an infinitesimal cog in a massive destructive machine, and his question is, simply, what would you have done?
Or, more succinctly, in Aue’s words, it is “a fact established by modern history that everyone, or nearly everyone, in a given set of circumstances, does what he is told to do; and pardon me, but there’s not much chance that you’re the exception, any more than I was. If you were born in a country or at a time not only when nobody comes to kill your wife and your children, but also nobody comes to ask you to kill the wives and children of others, then render thanks to God and go in peace. But always keep this thought in mind: you might be luckier than I, but you’re not a better person. Because if you have the arrogance to think you are, that’s just where the danger begins.”
The Kindly Ones, fastidiously researched (Littell spent many years on the project and read over two hundred books on the German occupation of the USSR alone) is without doubt one of the most extraordinary novels of recent times: I would place it, together with Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 as one of the two most significant pieces of literary fiction in the 21st century, at least that I’m aware of. 2666 was written in Spanish, obviously, but Jonathan Littell’s book was first published in French as Les Bienveillantes in 2006 and won the Prix Goncourt. It is marvellously translated by Charlotte Mandell, and maybe I will write about it when I have finished (I am not quite half way through its 960 pages, but will stand by my current appraisal nonetheless), but in the meantime I am fascinated by the cover picture, poorly reproduced here, because I could not find a copy of the original, despite searching online through the Keystone/Getty archive, who apparently hold the original. If any readers know anything at all about this photograph, please let me know.
Sarkozy eaten alive by bear
A Black Bear
A French President
This morning I emerge from a waking dream in which President Sarkozy is being eaten by a black bear. Quite a fitting end, I would think, for this preening bantam cock of a man, to be gobbled up in a couple of mouthfuls by Murder Bear. I can imagine George Papandreou looking on with pleasure, perhaps passing the bear the tzatziki.
Bears have had a role in literature for hundreds of years. Their appearance in folk tales of eastern European origin has filtered into a wider, and more infantilised role, since the appearance of Winnie the Pooh in the 1920s, when bears underwent a perceptual shift, from being a wild threat from the woods to becoming cuddly companions. The Goldilocks story held a particular fascination for Blanco as a child. Is it helpful to inform my reading public of such things, I wonder?
In the film The Edge (1997) one of the characters gets eaten by a bear, quite graphically, and I remember being shocked at the time, not so much by the violence, but by the impact on the imagination of watching someone being eaten alive by another creature. It was one of the most disturbing things I can remember seeing. So I will have to share it with you.
A brief illustrated history of the praying mantis
This praying mantis appeared on the table in our back yard yesterday. The praying mantis or mantid (sometimes misspelled as ‘preying mantis’, as it is a hunter as well as seeming to adopt a position of prayer) is from the family of mantodea, a term for the species devised by the German entomologist Hermann Burmeister in 1838 from the Greek mantis, meaning ‘prophet’, and eidos, meaning ‘shape’. Prophet-shaped. Burmeister obviously had a sense of humour. More exactly Burmeister determined that it belonged under the Phylum of Arthropoda, the Class of Insecta, the Subclass of Pterygota, the Infraclass Neoptera, the Superorder of Dictyoptera and the Order of Mantodea. And, as my daughter pointed out, ‘mantodea’ sounds quite Welsh, though that is neither here nor there.
Mantises have two grasping, spiked forelegs in which prey – and sexual partners – are caught and held securely. According to the Wikipedia entry “Sexual cannibalism is common among mantises in captivity, and under some circumstances may also be observed in the field. The female may start feeding by biting off the male’s head (as they do with regular prey), and if mating had begun, the male’s movements may become even more vigorous in its delivery of sperm. Early researchers thought that because copulatory movement is controlled by a ganglion in the abdomen, not the head, removal of the male’s head was a reproductive strategy by females to enhance fertilisation while obtaining sustenance.” The second half of the clip is particularly revealing:
Hmmm.
But wait, there’s more:
“The reason for sexual cannibalism has been debated, with some considering submissive males to be achieving a selective advantage in their ability to produce offspring. This theory is supported by a quantifiable increase in the duration of copulation among males who are cannibalized, in some cases doubling both the duration and the chance of fertilization. This is further supported in a study where males were seen to approach hungry females with more caution, and were shown to remain mounted on hungry females for a longer time, indicating that males actively avoiding cannibalism may mate with multiple females. The act of dismounting is one of the most dangerous times for males during copulation, for it is at this time that females most frequently cannibalize their mates. This increase in mounting duration was thought to indicate that males would be more prone to wait for an opportune time to dismount from a hungry female rather than from a satiated female that would be less likely to cannibalize her mate. Some consider this to be an indication that male submissiveness does not inherently increase male reproductive success, rather that more fit males are likely to approach a female with caution and escape.”
Close up, the mantis head looks very much like a classic representation of an alien:
In a 1957 B Movie, titled The Deadly Mantis, polar ice begins to shift southward following a volcanic eruption. But below the melting ice a praying mantis, 60 metres in length, lies trapped. The melted ice frees it and off it flies, wreaking havoc on a number of North American cities. My favourite line: “In all the kingdom of the living there is no more deadly or voracious creature than the praying mantis.”
Rant
The Rant is in three parts:
Firstly: in Spain, the reporting of the riots in England has uniformly emphasised the racial nature of the disturbances. I am not in a position to comment objectively, having only read the reports in The Guardian online and the BBC, in neither of which race has been presented as a dominant theme.
However, yesterday in El Mundo – the Guardian’s sister paper in Spain – I read:
‘Fortunately, in Spain, the social tensions that have erupted in the United Kingdom and France are absent, probably because the underlying racial component in those countries does not exist in our country.’ This is tantamount to saying there is no racism in Spain, which is clearly nonsense, as any social study taken over the past twenty years will prove. Spain is rife with insidious as well as overt racism. Anyone who thinks otherwise is a cretin, or else in denial.
Second: following enthusiastic reports on Facebook, I bought a DVD of the Korean film Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter . . . and Spring before coming on holiday. Actually, I should add that the FB discussion of the film was unanimously approving, emphasizing said film’s transcendent qualities etc. and, not an irrelevance, all the discussants were women. We watched the film the night before last. It goes like this (look away if you don’t want to know what happens): A monk lives with a small boy, his apprentice. The apprentice tortures animals so the monk tortures the boy in order to make him learn about karma. The boy grows to early manhood. A young woman and her mother turn up at the hermitage (set idyllically in the centre of a lake), hoping to find a cure for the girl’s mysterious malady. We know at once what is going to happen: it is in the eyes of the young man and the young woman. I say to Mrs Blanco – unnecessarily, I admit – that the novice monk will shag the girl and she will get better. It was hardly insightful. So, he takes her to his favourite pool (the one in which he tortured animals as a child) and they do it up against a rock, with requisite although not excessive vigour. Miraculously, the young woman is cured.
The young monk can no longer stay with his master. He longs to marry the young woman and live with her in the real world, where they can do what they did in the rock-pool all day long, without having to break off for spiritual exercises. ‘Desire leads to attachment and attachment leads to murder’ says the old geezer, or something similar. But the young man’s mind is made up. He follows his girlfriend out into the real world (Summer). The years pass. The old man is sweeping out his hermitage when he comes across a scrap of newspaper. How did the newspaper get there? No matter, but it does beg a few questions: ‘Man in his thirties murders wife and flees’. Sure enough, his protégé turns up, on the run, looking much the worse for wear, and sporting a scoundrel’s moustache. He weeps and weeps and tells the old geezer that his wife was unfaithful and loved another man, the hussy. The police are in hot pursuit, and arrive at the sanctuary in the lake. The old man hands the murderer over to the police, but first insists that he carry out some penitence, which involves inscribing a very long mantra on the floor overnight. Then, in the morning, off he goes to prison. Next season however he is back, looking not much older (murdering a woman is obviously not a major offence in Korea). In the meantime the old geezer has incinerated himself, so the young geezer becomes the new old geezer, in fact in the film he is replaced by the same actor. You get the picture; eternal return et cetera. Then in ‘Winter’ a woman turns up, her head entirely covered in a cloth, and deposits a baby with the monk, before falling through a hole in the ice on her way back across the lake from the hermitage and conveniently drowning. In the final sequence, the second ‘Spring’, the new little boy is growing up to be as much of a brat as the first one, and we see him setting off to torture a few frogs. And so it goes.
‘This is one of the very few films which has a real spiritual dimension; it bears that dimension lightly, and persuasively transmits a Buddhist conviction that time, age and youth are an illusion. A charming and rewarding film” writes Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. “A charming and rewarding film . . . delightful, meditative, serene and gripping” trills another Guardian review; “A work of transporting beauty”, says The Times; “Thoroughly enjoyable and magical” goes the Sunday Mirror.
What a pile of dross. Why do we continue to be sold this kind of Art Film as though it were ‘spiritually uplifting’, when it is simply medieval, repressive, misogynist tripe of the kind that religious fundamentalists have been flogging forever and are flogging still? We hang onto a bizarre fantasy in the West that Buddhism is exempt from this kind of attitudinizing. Moreover, the film is neatly packaged, beautifully shot – and because it is ‘exotic’ everything else – content, dialogue, moral compass, is excluded from judgement.
As far as I could tell the moral of the story is threefold:
1) female illness can normally be cured by male sexuality (aka: a ‘proper seeing to’)
2) men who wish to follow a ‘spiritual path’ will only ever meet with trouble and strife from women, so it is much healthier for the men concerned if the women are a) murdered, or b) fall into holes in the ice.
3) all these things can happen without any qualms so long as they take place in an exotic setting, reflect ‘local’ religious or cultural values and have an ‘uplifting’ or ‘spiritual’ message, and are thereby exempted from the critical criteria we would normally apply to any home-grown cultural artefact.
Third: In August the dogs in this village bark most of the day, and all night. Normally I am oblivious to this, but last night I was not. Last night it drove me to distraction, and eventually, to sleeplessness. It begins as a single, righteous statement of self-assertion on the part of some bonzo, but within seconds he is contested by another, who thinks he can bark louder than the first. A third joins in, invariably some yappy specimen who cannot really compete with the first at all, but has half a mind to follow on the heels of the second woofer . . . and so it goes in a spasmodic but inevitable crescendo. Before long there is total bloody cacophony as terrace after terrace explodes in a fury of barking, and I get up, scribble down something on a notepad which in the morning will be unintelligible, take two tramadol, or two diazepam, or two of whatever is going, and return to bed. Or else just sit on the roof, as I did last night, and watch the waxing moon.
Hobo with a Shotgun
What is a picture of Joseph Roth, chronicler of the decline of the Austro-Hungarian Empire doing beneath this heading? Did Roth have a shotgun? Was he a hobo? In a way, the answer is yes to both questions, indirectly.
Last night I went to see this film simply on the strength of its title. Mrs Blanco chose not to accompany me after inspecting the trailer, so I went with Robin, who had dropped by with a copy of Patrick McGuinness’s excellent The Last Hundred Days, this week longlisted for the Man Booker prize, which I am reviewing for a newspaper and which will no doubt appear on this blog at a later date, and which I urge you all to read.
I do not however urge you to go and see Hobo with a Shotgun, not unless you have a very strong stomach. If you feel tempted to press play, and can endure the trailer, please be assured that it really does not do justice to the gratuitous nastiness of the film. There was a time, in London in the late 1970s when I enjoyed watching low budget exploitation or grindhouse movies: Death Weekend and Shivers are two that come to mind. But I don’t seem to have it in me now.
I’m not going to review this schlock, but I can reveal that apart from the early decapitation, there is also a graphic decocking, or involuntary penectomy. The script is pretty dire, although there is at least one memorable line: when the hobo, having saved his lady friend from a brutal encounter with a corrupt cop and, concealed by her beneath the corpse of the newly exploded policeman, they return to her apartment to prepare for their getaway, he comes out with: “I just gotta wipe this guy’s asshole off my face.” But for all the film’s many shortcomings – can we speak of shortcomings in a film from which we have such low expectations? – Rutger Hauer is craggily splendid.
And that brings me to the point: Rutger Hauer has played a vagrant before, in the film version of The Legend of the Holy Drinker, a little known gem, directed by Ermanno Olmi and released in 1988. The movie is based on the novella by Roth, himself a writer in the time-honoured tradition of the poet-vagabond. In the story, which is a kind of parable or fairy tale emanating, it seems to me, from the deep core of an alcoholic’s delirious wish-fulfilment, the beggar Andreas is presented with two hundred francs, which he promises to return, but in which task he repeatedly fails. However his humility and humanity constitute redemptive qualities amid the dissolution of his life, and the effect is oddly uplifting. In stark contrast to Hobo with a Shotgun, it is a powerfully atmospheric and exquisitely tender film, beautifully shot in Paris, notable also for being the last performance of the excellent Anthony Quayle. The extract below shows their first meeting near the bridge where Andreas sleeps.
If you cannot get hold of the film, try reading the novella: The Legend of the Holy Drinker was republished by Granta in 2001. Its author himself ended his days as an alcoholic in Paris, the city he loved, and to which he fled after Hitler’s rise to power. He was waiting, like other Jewish exiles, to be ‘wiped out’ once the Nazis showed up, as he knew they would. He lived in a cheap hotel and literally drank himself to death, passing away in hospital following days of delirium tremens in May 1939.
Life in a Day
This is, in its way, a very contemporary film: a kind of visual equivalent of flash fiction. Based on thousands of hours of video recordings from a single day – 24th August 2010 – the editors have created a 90 minute collage of moments, some more extensive than others. Certain of the characters are seen once only, others are revisited several times over the course of the film, among which are a Korean man who has been cycling around the world for seven years (he has been knocked off his bike six times and had surgery five times: some drivers are very careless, he remarks, generously) and a trio of goatherds from somewhere in eastern Europe, who swear at their goats and are troubled by the prospect of wives and of wolves.
It could have been called ‘youtube: the movie’ but the point about all the mini-narratives being set within the frame of a single day gave it more coherence than might otherwise be expected. We do retain a sense of global village life with the weird juxtaposition of footage from a New York coffee shop being followed by African women preparing cassava while singing and a South American shoeshine boy stuffing his pockets with sweets. I left the cinema with the sensation that for so many people, desperately attempting to assert their own experience and their own lives, social networks and new media such as Facebook and youtube might provide a constant if imperfect means to an end. We all do it, especially if we blog, twitter and facebook (is that a verb?). Everyone can be Montaigne in the digital age. In a way, too, the film reflects the fetishization of travel familiar to us from ‘gap year’ philosophy, whether of the youtube variety, or the more polished, but equally nauseating version proposed to its readers every Saturday in the Guardian travel section.
A recent article by Christopher Tyler in The London Review of Books mentions how Colin Thubron, in his Shadow of the Silk Road imagines ‘conversations with a sceptical trader resurrected from antiquity. “I’m afraid of nothing happening,” he tells him, “of experiencing nothing. That is what the modern traveller fears . . . Emptiness.” In the current era, the notion of pseudo-travel has become available to all of us, emerging nervously from our terror of nothing happening.
Back home, I eventually retire to bed, to read. I have been reading poetry at night for a few months, but I also read fiction, and am currently with Claire Keegan’s Walk the Blue Fields, stories of profound clarity, steeped in the Irish storytelling tradition. While reading, I drift in and out of sleep. I wake at three in the morning with the book still in my hands, sitting up in bed and wavering in the space between sleep and non-sleep, though not yet wakefulness. This has become familiar territory. I have spent a long time being sleep-deprived, and am acquainted with this place, the zone. Drifting between sleep and not-sleep I am confronted by a person, standing at the foot of my bed. I am accustomed to this kind of intervention. Some call them hallucinations, but I know better.
This time he wears a cowboy hat. I ask him who he is.
“Calvin Bucket,” he says.
A likely story.
“Andy Coulson?” He suggests.
That’s better. I like the way these episodes meld with the fantasy that we call reality.
“Now, here’s how it is, Calvin, Andy, Cyrano, whatever.” I say. “You want to validate your existence? Fuck off and do it somewhere else, with someone who believes in you.”
And pouf. He vanishes.
The only ones validating their existence around here are me and my dog.
Patagonia, the film
Imagine my surprise, on a crisp and cloudless day in March this year, sitting down to lunch outside a restaurant in Toledo, when I discovered that the young couple at the next table were speaking Welsh. I was skiving off from a rather dull conference in Madrid, and Toledo, less than an hour away, seemed an ideal distraction. It was one of those moments of apparent disconnect, when you need to make a quick inventory of your surroundings, pinch yourself, do some sums, listen doubly hard to make certain you are not hallucinating the sounds. We fell into conversation – this is almost inevitable if you happen to speak a minority language, however badly, and meet compatriots in foreign parts – and the talk came around to Welsh cinema. The film Patagonia had just been released: I had been away from Cardiff and unable to go and see it.
So I finally got around to watching it last night, and, on balance, I enjoyed it. Although I had reservations about the script, including the rather cheap trick of withholding vital information that undermines our response to the central protagonists’ relationship, the cinematography and acting were excellent. Nia Roberts gave a strong performance as a woman who wants more from life than she can reasonably expect; her boyfriend Rhys (Matthew Gravelle’s irritatingly dour and uptight photographer) goes through a minor epiphany on finding the body of a dead dog on the road, and later, in a redemptive act, befriends the dog’s shambolic, alcoholic tramp of an owner. Matthew Rhys, as their Patagonian guide, is an effective and powerful presence onscreen, subtly pitched the right side of brooding. This Patagonian part of the story comes close to being Big Cinema, but somehow just falls short. It was the Welsh adventure of the young Argentinian, Alejandro, cajoled out of his virtual life of sci-fi novels by his elderly neighbour Cerys (played by Marta Lubos) that most captivated. For both myself and Mrs Blanco, Alejandro (Nahuel Pérez Biscayar) was the star turn of this film, and we were most entertained by the scenes in which he appears, even his puppyish romp with Duffy, with whom he is improbably reunited after first meeting her when she passes out at a Cardiff nightclub.
But why do I always endure that nervousness, or painful sense of resistance, whenever Welsh artists (and that includes many of our writers, visual artists and film-makers) attempt to make a statement about contemporary Wales or any articulation of ‘Welshness’. However hard they try, there always seems to be some frantic element at work, as though we, as a nation, still have something to prove to the world. No one is interested. Certainly no one outside of Wales gives a shit, and many of us who live here just want to get on with our work without having to make continuous self-reflective reference to our Welshness. As if a Swiss writer had to pepper his stories with references to cuckoo clocks and dairy milk chocolate. So there seems to be something desperate about having to bring Blodeuwedd into the story as kind of smash and grab raid on the Mabinogion. It’s like stating outright: ‘Look, we have these early medieval antecedents, this embedded narrative mythology.’ I’m sorry, but it just doesn’t wash, and nobody cares anyway. And if you’re going to do it, do it in such a way that isn’t bloody obvious. Likewise the farcical pseudo-Celtic water burial ceremony awarded to Marta Lubos, poor thing – Health and Safety would have been down on that like a ton of bara brith.
Given my own self-confessed prejudices, I ended up enjoying this film far more than I had intended to. Er, four stars?
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